


Still Scared of an Old Lady?

by ChekhovsDormantSupervolcano



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Anger, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Flirting, Grief/Mourning, It's ambiguous, Mild Swearing, canon compliant to the best of my knowledge, honestly kind of an enemies with benefits dynamic, just flirting and baggage, lovers to enemies to both maybe?, relationship tag may be disingenuous, shifting pov, there is no sex in this story, this is mostly about their dynamic as exes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21750664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChekhovsDormantSupervolcano/pseuds/ChekhovsDormantSupervolcano
Summary: “If you’re here to seduce information out of me, Reilly, it’s not happening this time,” said Liv. She flashed a grin at May, but there was steel beneath it. “There's too much riding on this one.”“I know,” said May. She didn’t match Liv’s smile.  “I’m here with a message.”“From the Amazing Spider-Man?” Liv asked with mock awe.“No,” said May. “From me.”“Ah.” Liv leaned against her counter, eyes sharp on May. “That’s a lot more interesting.”May pulled her jacket off and tossed it over a chair near the tiny table. “Wine, please,” she suggested, sitting down.A long time ago, Dr May Reilly and Dr Olivia Octavius worked together on a project that got out of hand—at least, by May's definition. May walked away from their work and their romance, but May has been married and widowed since then, and the two are back in touch. For years now they've had an unspoken agreement: May doesn't tell the world that Dr Octavius is the infamous Doc Ock, and Liv doesn't tell any other supervillains that May Parker is working with Spider-Man.But there are things they don't tell each other. And things May won't forgive.(We all know where Liv went after she got hit by that bus)
Relationships: Olivia Octavius & May Parker (Spider-Man), Olivia Octavius/May Parker (Spider-Man)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 46





	1. Prologue: I'm Here with a Message

**Author's Note:**

> Prologue takes place the night before Into the Spiderverse. The rest of the story (barring flashbacks) will take place in the days right after the movie ends. (We [the lesbian nation] all know Olivia survived that bus.)

May put a foot on the stairs and paused, as a series of flying robot gun-things swiveled noisily out of the wall to point at her head. 

“It’s just me,” said May calmly, barely glancing at the array of showily lethal technology. She raised an eyebrow at the camera she knew was in the doorknocker. “Still scared of an old lady, Liv?”

A bright light shone out of the doorknocker, scanning her iris. May blinked, irritated. Her vision was still clearing as the door folded itself open in a gaudy show of remote-controlled flashing steel to reveal Doctor Olivia Octavius. 

“Always,” said Liv brightly. The gun-things swiveled back into their notches in the wall.

“How did you even get my eye print, asshole?”

Liv smirked. “I have to keep some of my secrets, don’t I?”

“You are such a creep.” 

Liv shrugged, and walked back into her apartment. (May refused to use the word “lair” for a place that had a futon bed with an old afghan on it wedged between the fridge and the particle accelerator.) She left the door open. May, who was not an idiot, stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. “Disable the things, Liv.”

“What are you talking about? Door’s open.” Liv opened the freezer and peered into it. “Hm. I’m out of rum raisin.”

“Liv.”

Liv sighed, obviously disappointed. “Secondary security disable,” she called out to the apartment at large.

May waited a moment, listening to the quiet high-pitched whir of an electric tripwire deactivating. 

“We need to talk,” she said, stepping over the threshold. The steel-and-chrome door folded itself shut behind her.

“If you’re here to seduce information out of me, Reilly, it’s not happening this time,” said Liv. She flashed a grin at May, but there was steel beneath it. “There's too much riding on this one.”

“I know,” said May. She didn’t match Liv’s smile. “I’m here with a message.”

“From the Amazing Spider-Man?” Liv asked with mock awe. 

“No,” said May. “From me.”

“Ah.” Liv leaned against her counter, eyes sharp on May. “That’s a lot more interesting.”

May pulled her jacket off and tossed it over a chair near the tiny table. “Wine, please,” she suggested, sitting down. 

Liv raised an eyebrow, then smirked, and reached into her liquor cabinet. She got out glasses, a bottle, a napkin, which she laid down in front of May. More objects than she had hands for, but then, that wasn’t a problem for Liv.

While Liv poured the wine, May rifled through the pockets of her jacket, and pulled out a miniature testing kit. “Thank you, dear,” she said absently, taking the glass that Liv handed her, and sticking a brightly colored glass rod into it. She waited a moment, watching the rod lighten until it was transparent. 

“You really don’t have to do that every time,” said Liv, sitting down. “Poisoning’s not my style.”

The rod had gone perfectly clear. May removed it, laid it on the napkin Liv had provided, and took a sip of wine. “No one ever died from being too careful,” she said.

“I can think of a couple exceptions to that.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Liv watched her take another sip. “You know,” she suggested, “you could still give seduction a shot. It can’t hurt to try, right?”

May set her glass down on the table. Liv took a look at her expression, and stopped joking. She sat back in her chair, eyes on May’s. “All right, Reilly,” she said softly. “What’s your message?”

May took a moment to answer, sliding her wine around in its glass. “You know I like you,” she said at last. “I always have, can’t seem to shake it. And I don’t blame you for how things are, because I know you didn’t drag Spider-Man into any of this, he got involved on his own. Mostly, I let the two of you do your dance without me. I’m just the technical support. But you’re right, Liv. This one is different. This one—I can tell this one is dangerous.”

“Mm?”

“I don’t know all the details, I never do—”

“Liar,” said Liv, without rancor, and took a sip of her wine. May smiled a little at the interruption. But only a little. 

“Liv, if you kill Spider-Man tomorrow, I will either kill you, or I will die trying to kill you.”

For a long, shocked second, there was no sound in the apartment except the quiet constant whine of illegal machinery. Then Liv put down her wineglass. The click it made when it touched the table seemed incredibly loud.

“It’s important that you believe me,” said May.

Liv seemed to be speechless.

“Do you believe me?” May pressed.

“We worked together for six years, May,” said Liv, finding her voice. “And we’ve worked against each other for twelve. And in all that time, and all the time in between, I have never threatened your life.”

“I know,” said May. “I’m threatening yours now. And I need you to know that I mean it.”

“Who is this kid to you?”

“Tell me you understand that I mean it.”

“Who  _ is  _ this kid to you?” Liv demanded. “Is he your boyfriend or something?”

“ _ Liv, _ ” said May, eyebrows shooting up. “Are you serious?”

“Who is he, then? I know you, Reilly, and you’re not this. You’re not a people person, you’re not a ride-or-die person, and you’re definitely not a killer. In all the time I’ve known you I can’t think of anybody you’d care enough about to— _ oh _ ,” said Liv, and stopped talking. She stared at May. “No,” she said.

“Liv,” said May. It was a plea, although she didn’t know what for, exactly. She watched Liv push her chair back and slowly stand up. Watched the connections form behind Liv’s eyes, watched that brilliant mind go to work and re-explain every strange coincidence, every pair of events that had just happened to line up. 

“No,” said Liv again, slowly, and May gazed at her and thought,  _ you must have been trying so hard not to see it.  _ For a genius like Liv to have avoided putting together the obvious for so many years, she must have cared for May very deeply. 

“Liv—” May started the plea without knowing where she would end it, but she didn’t find out, because she was cut off. 

_ “Peter?” _

And there it was. Over. No chance to thank her for those years of careful ignorance. May stood up. “Tell me that you believe me.”

“ _ Your Peter _ is Spider-Man? Peter fucking Parker is Spider-Man _. _ Jesus Christ, Reilly, how long—my God, the whole time. You’ve known the whole time. Obviously.” Liv was shaking her head. “The whole time you’ve been coming here, playing this on-the-fence game. You were never on any fence. You haven’t been ‘working with’ Spider-Man. You’ve been raising him.”

“Tell me that you believe me,” May repeated.

“I could fucking kill you.”

“Probably,” said May. “But it won’t be easy. I didn’t come here unprepared.”

“ _ Peter? _ ” Liv’s tentacles were out, but not, May thought, for any violent purpose. They were waving around her, rearing up. She was having a cognitive crisis. “Your Peter? Peter is a kid! He’s twelve years old!”

“He’s twenty-six.”

“Same thing! I  _ know  _ Peter. I sent a chemistry set to Peter!”

“Yes, and four was far too young for that, by the way,” said May mildly. “I had to hold onto it until he was older.”

“You think this is a joke? Reilly, I have baby pictures of Peter!”

In spite of the circumstances, May was surprised enough to smile. “You kept those?”

“You shouldn’t have told me,” said Liv. She had gotten mostly ahold of herself; the tentacles were slowing down. “You shouldn’t have told me this. If anyone I work with finds this out, you’re dead in a week. Or kidnapped, or—”

“I’ve prepared for that too,” said May. “Liv. I’m not here to talk about the people you work with. I’m here to tell you that if _you_ kill my nephew tomorrow, I promise you, Olivia Octavius, _I will kill you. Tell me you believe me._ ”

Liv’s tentacles coiled up and vanished into wherever they’d come from. Suddenly she was just a person, standing there in frayed Keen sandals and messy hair. The researcher who’d won a dozen awards, had rewritten half the textbooks, had nearly ended the world at least twice. The student May’d trained who had long since surpassed her. The woman May had known for more than thirty years. Had admired even before that. Had at one time very nearly loved.

Had never, in all that time, been quite able to hate.

“I believe you,” said Liv. “Now leave. Please. While you can.”


	2. Truck. Interdimensional. Hit me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The events of the film Into the Spider-Verse take place between the last chapter and this one.

Liv plowed through May’s front door the day after Peter’s funeral and went straight for May.

The door slammed open and a tentacle-arm shot through, reaching across the room to slap the plate out of May’s hand before anyone had time to react. As though, with a half-dozen superheroes crowding the room, May was somehow her biggest threat.

Still scared of an old lady. 

***

And then Liv was gone, with her cronies and all the bizarre otherworldly spider-people, tearing up half the neighborhood but finally out of May’s goddamn house, although the living room wall would never be the same. 

There was a fight—there was always a fight—over the fate of the city again.

May helped out the new kid when he asked her to. He was sweet. He was younger than Peter had been when he started, and it made her heart ache to make him a pair of weapons and send him into battle. But that was the nature of this fight. 

And it wasn’t her fight. Not really. Not anymore. 

***

And because it wasn’t really her fight anymore, she reacted differently than she might have, when she woke up to a clanging noise in the middle of the night and went outside with her baseball bat to find Dr. Olivia Octavius curled in a half-dead heap in her backyard, having apparently climbed over the fence and then collapsed. One of her tentacles was broken, spitting sparks; another was missing entirely. The two remaining mostly-intact ones twitched sporadically at her sides, as though threatening to short out any minute. May doubted Liv would have made it over the fence without the half-functioning tentacle pack, though. Her real limbs didn't look like they were in any shape to hold her. 

“Reilly,” said Liv, looking up at her. Her armor was torn in a hundred places, and so was her skin. Bruises in colors May had never seen before made a patchwork of her face. She swallowed, and even that looked like it hurt. May could see that talking cost her, but Liv pushed out four more words. “I didn’t do it.”

“A supercollider?” May snapped, not lowering the baseball bat. “You expect me to believe that was Kingpin’s idea?”

Liv shook her head, and then winced, looking like she regretted moving her neck. “I meant...Peter,” she said. “Your Peter. I didn’t...kill him. That...wasn’t me.”

May felt suddenly like she was a thousand years old. She leaned the baseball bat against the doorframe. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“Reilly,” said Liv, “I have...nowhere to go.”

“Try prison,” said May, a flash of anger rising in her, but it didn’t last long. She was already crouching down to help Liv sit up. 

“Cops will make sure I die on the table,” said Liv, leaning heavily on May. “Or they’ll give me to the Defense Department, tell me to build things. Bad things. Either way...I’d rather die in your backyard.” 

Knowing Liv, she probably thought that sounded romantic.

“You always did have bizarre morals.” Or else she was preying on May’s. Her desire to avoid the DOD was probably sincere, but May guessed it had more to do with patent control than avoiding civilian casualties. But it worked. May sighed, and stood up, pulling Liv with her, her back creaking under the weight of Liv’s arm draped over her shoulders. “You’re dead fucking weight, you know that. What happened to you?”

“Truck,” said Liv. “Interdimensional. Hit me.”

“Of  _ course _ it did.”

“Will you help me?”

“I don’t know, Liv.” May sighed, and all the exhaustion, the ache of the last week, was audible in the sigh. “I guess I’m not going to let you die tonight. In the morning...well, ask me in the morning.”


	3. Carried Away

The thing was, Liv never exactly betrayed her.

That was how she told the story to Peter—a grand unexpected treachery—because it was easier than owning up to the truth, which was that May had gotten carried away. Olivia was brilliant, and intense, and she had this way of coming up with ideas that seemed outrageous and then making them happen. May had wanted to be part of that. She had wanted to rewrite the rules, push the boundaries of what was possible. She had overlooked risks she should not have overlooked, made excuses for things she should not have excused, and it was a little harder for her than for Liv, but it wasn’t _that_ hard.

And when you’re working applied physics and engineering on that level, almost all the funding available comes from the military. For an old-school peacenik like May, who had marched against Vietnam and didn’t think Iraq was any different, that narrowed your options. Dr. Octavius was comfortable working in an under-resourced lab in a university basement on a grant that never quite covered the bills in order to preserve the integrity of the research. In order to make sure no one else would ever weaponize the tech they were building.

May really should have paid more attention to the way Liv emphasized _no one_ _else._

But she got distracted, got just as carried away as Olivia in those hectic groundbreaking years when they were both pushing the limits of what neuroscience and robotics could be persuaded to do. Liv had the excuse of being twenty-five and starry-eyed and a newly certified genius. May was older, more used to coming at problems the long way around, and she should have known better. Should have had more regard for things like research ethics, intellectual property, university oversight...and come to that, workplace boundaries, and on a few _memorable_ occasions, basic lab safety. 

As the project had gone on, had gotten farther from what they’d first set out to do, as they had celebrated breakthrough after breakthrough with bottles of cheap champagne in their shared office with its fake leather couch, they’d started to realize that they’d developed different ideas about what they wanted to do with their new technology. May kept talking about the groundbreaking progress they could make in prosthetics: multi-jointed robotic limbs that could respond to the brain activity of the wearer, could restore full arm or leg function to an amputee. Liv had different, wilder ideas. May had told Peter that part of the story: how Liv seemed to go further and further into mad-science territory while May tried to rein her back, tried to remind her that there were rules, that this was supposed to be medical research. What she _hadn’t_ told Peter….

Was that she had mostly brought up those things in order to be talked out of them. She loved Liv’s crazy, loved the wild glint in her eye when she had an idea, loved Liv’s joyful narcissism. Genius is _hot,_ even when it has no greater moral goal attached to it. And May had a trace of reckless genius herself, enough to have attracted the attention of the famous Dr. Octavius in the first place. Enough to consider propositions that a more conscientious scientist would have rejected out of hand. 

Olivia didn’t betray Dr. May Reilly. She seduced her.

Eventually, Liv went too far. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that eventually May drew the line; probably Liv had gone “too far,” by any reasonable metric, long before that. They parted ways, not quite amicably, but as mutually respectful, if resentful, colleagues. May let Liv keep all the patents; she had decided, in what she later recognized as cowardice, that she wanted to wash her hands of the project altogether. 

Liv let May keep all the money they’d made. There was a lot of it. May bought a house. 

And Liv never stopped keeping tabs on May Reilly. Not even when she changed her name to May Parker. Not even when Liv started going by Doc Ock. 

Liv wrote to her, real old-fashioned pen on paper, once or twice a year. Very occasionally, May wrote back. More postcards than letters. She wrote to Liv when she got married, when she paid off her mortgage, when her nephew was born (that card had pictures in it, which Liv apparently had kept.) Only happy occasions, and ones that very explicitly excluded Liv. _I am married. I have a home. I have a family. Leave it alone._ Liv acted like she didn’t notice the subtext, sending a case of wine to May’s door after the wedding, mailing presents for Peter on his birthday (including a fully equipped chemistry set when Peter turned four, which May had to hold onto for a few more years before she gave it to him. Liv seemed kind of shaky on the whole idea of children)

And then came the day that a woman wielding Liv’s tech— _May’s tech_ —showed up on shaky camera-phone footage on national TV. 

And killed four people.

And then came the day that Spider-Man fought that woman, also on national television. And the woman almost killed _him._

It was a jolt of reality that May badly needed. She’d pretended not to notice where her nephew went at night.. She’d wanted to give him space to figure out his identity and his plans, to keep his secret as long as he felt he had too. She’d been proud of him. And afraid, maybe, too, that she was the wrong person to help him. That the version of May who wanted to leave a mark on the world, who _knew how to do it,_ should be left in the past. The birth of Doc Ock was a harsh awakening: the past doesn’t stay in the past. You have to deal with what you’ve done. 

So May told Peter he was accepting her help whether he wanted it or not, because if it was Olivia Octavius that Peter was up against, he was going to need all the help he could get. That was when they built the lair in the basement, and May got to work on upgrading his suit.

( _Still scared of an old lady,_ May thought to herself now. The realization came too late, bitter and regretful. Because Olivia was _her_ nightmare, her responsibility, she’d allowed herself to think of her as Peter’s greatest threat. But it wasn’t Liv who had killed Peter Parker.) 

Not too long after that, Liv heard through the grapevine that someone named Parker might be involved with helping Spider-Man. She decided to pay her ex-partner a visit. May’s teenage nephew didn’t cross her mind. Liv and May shared the same tunnel vision, the same myopic focus. 

That was when they started sharing glasses of wine. Tense, secretive, paradoxically trusting glasses of wine. See, Liv knew May could keep a secret. Knew May had _chosen_ to keep Liv’s secret, because she must have known what she was looking at the first time Doc Ock showed up on her TV screen destroying a city block. She must have recognized her own tech. Yet no news outlet had reported an anonymous tip, _“Doctor Octopus’s secret identity revealed!”_ No detectives had showed up at Liv’s lab, or her apartment. For whatever reason, May had decided not to share what she knew.

Probably that made Liv think she could talk May around again. One more grand round of seduction. Liv didn’t seem to realize how far over the line she’d gone, didn’t see that May could never partner with a casual killer. Or maybe—and this occasionally kept May up at night—maybe Liv was absolutely right about her, and the only thing she hadn’t realized was that May had skin in the game. Maybe if Peter wasn’t around, Liv would have gotten everything she wanted from May.

Up till their last glass of wine at Liv’s place, Liv didn’t know about Peter. No way would May turn coat while Peter’s life was staked in the fight, she couldn’t even imagine it. And it wasn’t just that he was her nephew, was practically her kid. Peter, with his love for his city, for all the people in it, even his warm-hearted mournful love for half the people he was fighting, Peter with his resilience, with his unshakeable moral compass, his absolute inability to walk away from a fight—Peter brought out the best part of May. The part of her that was almost a hero. The part of her that could never have been a villain. Without Peter, May would be a different person. 

Without Peter….

The thing was, Liv never _had_ to betray her. May had been very nearly onboard.

The thing was...Peter was dead. There was a raging, gnawing hole in May where he had been, threatening to eat her alive if she looked too closely into it. But there was no actual _Peter,_ to draw the lines in the sand and make it look effortless, to make the clear cut between right and wrong. He was gone.

And Olivia Octavius was sleeping on May’s living room couch. 

May wasn’t sure she trusted herself to handle this next part. 


	4. This Next Part

“Do you want to know what happened?” Liv asked. 

She was propped into a mostly-sitting-upright position on the couch, clutching a mug of coffee. Still alive, and still not incarcerated, although May had taken her tentacle box and stashed it somewhere that her neural link couldn’t seem to reach. She’d been trying, surreptitiously, all morning.

Of course, she had other resources. Even injured, weaponless, dressed in May’s old pajamas with a headache the size of Brooklyn, she had assets she could call in. Ways she could take control of this situation. But to what end? The supercollider was broken, probably permanently, her associates were all in federal custody, her lab was crawling with agents and her funding was definitely frozen by now. Eventually she could regroup, recuperate, make new plans. But right now, what immediate goal did she have that was worth trashing May Reilly’s living room again?

“No, I don’t want to know what happened.” said May. She sat in a chair across from Liv, elbows braced on her knees. Her fingers were laced around her own cup of coffee. Her eyes flicked occasionally between Liv and the coffee, and Liv got the distinct feeling that she liked the coffee better. “I know what I need to know. I know you didn’t kill Peter. I know Fisk _did_ kill Peter, and that right now he’s in a cell somewhere that an old woman with a shotgun and a couple PhDs and jack-all else can’t get into without more premeditation than I’m willing to devote to that sort of thing. I know that New York City’s still in one piece. I know everyone got home okay, including the new kid, because he called me to make sure I wouldn’t worry. I don’t want to know the rest of it. The rest of it is not my problem anymore.”

“The new kid called you? From another dimension?” Liv asked, startled. “Oh. No. You mean—there’s a new Spider-Man. Here.”

“Fuck you,” said May, with real anger. She did not raise her voice, or change her posture, but Liv still heard the force behind it, and winced a little.

“Sorry,” she said. “Really. I’m not here to—to get anything out of you. Or to trick you in any way. I really didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Bullshit,” said May. “You always have a backup plan. You came here to be forgiven.”

Well. That was fair, and almost true. Not about the backup plan—anyone else Liv could have called would have thrown her to the wolves last night—but fair to assume a second motive. Fair to assume Liv wasn’t done.

Fair, always, to assume that Liv hadn’t given up on May Reilly.

“I don’t expect to be forgiven,” Liv said.

“Good,” said May shortly. And then, her eyes closing, her harsh rigid posture dissolving, she put her mug down on the table and covered her face with her hands. She looked unbearably tired. “Liv, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

“Reilly, did you sleep last night?” Liv’s concern was real, but May acted as though she hadn’t spoken.

“I don’t have the space for this,” May said, head still in her hands. “You’re right, I can’t give you to the cops because they _will_ sell you to the military and I can’t have that kind of blood on my hands, not that you fucking care, by the way, don’t imagine that I bought that. But I can’t babysit a wounded supervillain, I don’t have the space in the house, I don’t have the time or the energy, I don’t have the—I don’t have the _heart_ for this, right now. My nephew is _dead,_ Liv, do you _understand_ that?”

“Yes,” said Liv. 

“Do you? Do you understand what it _means? You are not the only person who got hit by a fucking truck this week, Liv!_ I already did this,” May said, her voice growing bitter. “I already rebuilt my life around the gaping hole left by a person who I, I promised my life to. This house already has enough fucking ghosts. I am not ready to do this again, _alone_.”

“Reilly,” said Liv, dredging up all the sincerity she could find inside her, which, for once, was a fair amount, “I am—I am so sorry about Peter.”

“You don’t get to be sorry about Peter,” May said viciously. “I’m not killing you, because you didn’t kill him. But that is not the same thing as forgiveness, and it is not the same thing as a relationship. You wanna make a show of caring about me, Liv? Well, if _you_ had mattered even the slightest bit to _me_ , I would have thrown you out on the street last night. Anyone who I cared for, anyone who I _trusted,_ who let a man like Wilson Fisk break my nephew’s spine in half, would have died of blood loss on my sidewalk before I’d lend them a hand. You’re alive right now because I’ve _already written you off._ Because what you do doesn’t matter to me.” 

That was such twisted emotional logic that Liv didn’t where to start disputing it. “I know that you’re in pain,” she said after a moment of painful silence, “and that I am partially responsible, and I am really, honestly sorry. I—I never meant to do this to you.”

“No?” May lifted her head and turned those weary, hollow eyes on Liv. The spitting venom had drained out of her as suddenly as it had come. She spoke slowly. “But this is what death is, Olivia. This is what it does to people. How many people have you killed? How many people loved them? If you go through the world dealing that kind of damage, how long did you think it would take before one of the victims was someone you cared about?”

“A pretty long time,” said Liv. She was quite serious. “Statistically. There are a lot of people in the world, and a pretty short list of people I care about.”

“How lucky for me, then,” said May bitterly, “to be on that list.”

“I can’t fairly say you’re lucky,” Liv acknowledged, “under the circumstances. But you’re definitely special, Reilly.”

May snorted, and then was quiet for a little while. Liv thought it was probably a good idea to stay quiet too. 

Eventually, May exhaled noisily. “You can stay for a week,” she said. She shrugged one shoulder roughly, like she was shaking something off. Shook her head. “It’ll take that long before you’re safe to move. Maybe it’ll be good for me. You know, I’ve wrapped so much of my life around taking care of someone, for so long, since I’ve been alone I’ve been feeling—disoriented. I think if you stick around here for a few days I’m less likely to pick up a gun and go looking for Wilson. Maybe, at least, seeing you will help me remember why I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“I’m glad I can serve as your cautionary tale,” said Liv dryly. And then, hesitant, vulnerable in a way that she hated, “And after a week?”

“After a week you’re gone,” said May. “And if I see you again, I _will_ call the police.”

“Mm?” said Liv, raising an eyebrow. Took a risk. Made a joke. “You have some kind of vendetta against the NYPD?” 

Mirth crinkled the edges of May’s eyes. “Who doesn’t?” 

Liv felt a flicker of excitement at that tiny smile in May’s eyes. _An opening._ She leaned forward. “You know, we could help each other.”

May brushed a hand through the air, dismissive. “You mean I could help you.”

“No,” said Liv. “Really. You’re all heart, Reilly. You said it yourself, you’re not cut out to work alone. You need a partner in crime.” She allowed herself the hint of a smirk. “If you’ll forgive the phrasing.”

“I don’t need you,” said May flatly. “Ever again.” 

Liv heard her, heard the heavy finality in her voice, and it stung. But she pushed past it, kept leaning toward May, speaking in a low urgent tone. “Listen to me. Wilson was an idiot. Working with him, it was a nightmare, you have no idea. But you and me—it would be different. We would set our own parameters. Make our own rules.”

The last of the humor left May’s eyes. Her face became a warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Stop now, Olivia. Don’t try it.” 

“Come on, Reilly,” Liv breathed. “You and me. Anything you want.”

“I said stop.”

“Reilly—”

May put down her mug with a harsh _clunk._ “My _name_ is _May_ _Parker._ _And there is nothing in the world that I want that you can give me._ ” 

And this was it. This was the moment. Say it wrong now, and there would not be a second chance.

“I can give you everything you want,” Liv said. “Everything.” She glanced down, then up at May’s eyes again. “But you know that, or your knuckles wouldn’t be turning white from your grip on that cup.”

May’s hands moved from her mug, clenched on air, and then slowly opened. “You’re an idiot,” she said with a carefully constructed calm. “And any minute now you could be a dead one. Stop and think before you wear out your welcome.”

“Just listen to what I’m offering, Reilly—”

“I _swear_ —”

“May,” Liv corrected herself, holding a hand up in surrender. But she didn’t stop talking. “May, in the right hands, in _our_ hands, the tech can go past prototype. We can account for the side effects, no one has to die if you don’t want them to, and you can get what you stay up at night wishing for, and so can I. You _know_ I never wanted to blow up New York, I _live_ in New York. Wilson moved too fast, he pushed too hard, I _told_ him the collider wasn’t ready for a second attempt, but if he had just been patient—the principle was sound, it would have _worked_ if I could have—”

The last of May’s temper snapped. It was a visible event, like a rubber band breaking, and May stood up, shoving her chair back, nearly knocking it over. “Shut up,” she snarled, and the rage in her voice was so open and raw that Liv did shut up, at least for a moment. “You think I need you to spell it out? You think I don’t know what you’re offering? You’re so fucking _stupid_ , Olivia. How can you be such a fucking _idiot_? I mean, are you a child? You’ve never cared about anyone more than yourself, have you? You have no idea what’s happened, what I’ve lost. You have no idea what _you took_ from me.”

“I didn’t—” Liv began, but May cut her off. 

“Wilson Fisk is a fucking sociopath. He wanted a pretty picture of his family back because that’s all he ever saw them as. _I lost my child._ You think I want a _replacement?_ ” Her voice had grown hoarse. “That’s what you’re offering, right? That’s your grand idea?” She didn’t wait for confirmation, just kept hissing fury at Liv. “What I want, I won’t ever get back. That boy who came through your portal, he looked like my Peter, he had Peter’s voice, but he was a stranger. _My nephew_ died in your lab that night. What I _want_ is him, alive and safe and giving me an earful about letting an asshole like you crash on my couch again. That’s what I want. That’s what I need. You can _never_ give me that.”

“I can give you a chance to say goodbye,” said Liv.

May’s mouth snapped shut. She stared at Liv, speechless.

“There are infinite alternate universes,” said Liv, speaking into her coffee, trying to speak steadily, trying to treat this like a pitch meeting, like she was pulling on some funder’s ego, not on May Reilly’s heart. “Not just the five that we found. The timelines deviate at different points. The Peter Parker who came across from his own universe had deviated from your Peter pretty far back, I’m guessing, given the, you know, general slovenliness and depressive attitude. He didn’t have the youthful zest of the Spider-Man we both know and love, well, know and despise in my case.” She risked a glance at May’s expression, and decided the jokes were a mistake. Better stick to the facts for now. “What I’m trying to tell you is that given time—given precision, and care, and exhaustive research, and all the things that Wilson Fisk is constitutionally incapable of— we could find a universe that deviates from ours only at the last second.” 

Liv looked up for real, and met May’s eyes. She saw doubt there, and desperation, poorly buried. And, still, a lot of anger. 

May cleared her throat. “What do you mean by the last second?” 

Liv fought back the grin that tried to take over her face. “I mean that we could find a version of the universe where Peter Parker is exactly the same as your Peter, lives the same life, makes all the same choices, has the same hair color, and the only thing that’s different is that on [date], he didn’t die.” Liv considered reaching out to put a hand on May’s arm, and decided not to push her luck. “We couldn’t pull him through,” she said. “Not permanently, not to keep him here. I was always lying to Fisk about that. There’s no way to stabilize the paradox in the long term. And I know you wouldn’t, anyway. You would never agree to do that to the May Re—the May Parker you’d have to take him from. But we could do it for a few minutes. We could do it for long enough for you to say goodbye.”

She’d finished her speech. For several long moments, there was silence.

Slowly, May sat back down in her chair. She was nodding wordlessly, eyes distant, as if finishing some conversation with herself, Liv watched her closely. May didn’t look at Liv.

“And what do you think would happen then?” May asked at last.

“What?”

“What would happen?” May repeated. “If I got to say goodbye, what do you think that would do? Would it absolve you, do you think?”

“What? I’m not—this isn’t about—”

“Of course it is. You want to roll back the clock. You want us to be friends again, or at least, ha, enemies with benefits, like we used to be—”

“We were a _lot_ more than friends, Reilly—”

“And we’ll never be again,” said May coldly. “And you can’t handle it, you can’t handle _losing_ something, and that’s why you’re here. You want to undo the damage. And you can’t. You’re so _stupid,_ ” she said again. “You know nothing about loving someone.”

“Ouch,” said Liv. “From you to me, that’s low.”

May waved her complaint away with a flapping hand. “You’re an idiot,” she repeated. “You think I’d want to say goodbye to a, a carbon copy of my nephew? What does that change? What does that change for Peter, my Peter?”

“It’s not for him,” said Liv, frustrated. “It’s for you. To give you closure—”

“ _God,_ Liv, you’re so fucking selfish. Don’t you understand? If I were going to break all the laws of physics to say goodbye to Peter, it wouldn’t be so that I could see him again, you emotionally stunted imbecile! It isn’t _about me_. _Peter Parker died alone._ No one was there. No one thanked him, no one told him that he was loved, or that he was brave. I wasn’t there, I didn’t say those things, which means _he didn’t get to hear them_ , and you can drag as many Peters as you want through as many interdimensional portals as you want, and _my nephew_ _will still have died alone._ You want to fix us, you want to fix _me,_ you’d have to fix _that_. And for that you’d need more than an interdimensional supercollider. You’d need a fucking time machine.” 

“Okay,” said Liv, lightly. “So we build a time machine.” 

“Oh, go to hell, Liv.”

“No, I’m serious,” said Liv, getting excited. “The principle is adaptable. I mean, I already have draft schematics for isolating points of deviation. As far as I can tell, the point of deviation is where each universe is actually _created._ Not just where it starts to look different: where it _branches off_ from its parent universe. If we could find that point, it follows that we could travel to it, could change it, could prevent the deviation from occurring. We could _save_ Peter Parker—”

“ _You_ could have saved Peter Parker.”

Liv’s mouth worked for a moment. She gripped her coffee, and said nothing.

May pulled her mug off the coffee table and held it, cradled, in her lap. Her eyes didn't touch Liv; they fixed on the window. “The night my nephew died everyone was there but you,” she said. “Tombstone, Prowler, Osborne. _Fisk_. Party in the particle accelerator room.” She sing-songed the consonance like a child’s taunt. “Out of character for you, to let that crew duke it out with superheroes in your lab unsupervised.”

Still Liv said nothing. 

“They trashed your collider, you know. The new kid told me the place was a wreck when Norman and Peter were done with it. Hardly a surprise. But you let it happen.”

Liv put her coffee down. She couldn’t sit up quite straight, her torso was too bruised to hold her, but she could lift her head a little higher, and she did, mouth arrogant, her eyes rising to wait for May’s. She waited until May had pulled her eyes away from the window, waited for that gaze to turn into iron and drill into her. The sing-song lightness fell away. May stared her down. “Your lab,” May said flatly. “Your collider. And you weren’t there. I said ‘ _don’t kill Spider-Man_ ,’ and you didn’t show up to the fight.”

“That’s right,” said Liv. “And so?”

“You knew he was going to die that night.” May’s voice could have cut through stone. It didn’t cut through Liv. Liv stared straight ahead into that diamond-cutter gaze.

“You told me not to kill him,” she said. She didn’t drop her eyes. She was not apologizing. “I didn’t kill him.”

“You knew he would die, and so you stayed away, because you didn’t want me to think it was you.”

“I stayed away so that it _wasn’t_ me,” said Liv sharply. “And it wasn’t. I did what you asked, Reilly. You said don’t kill Spider-Man, I didn’t kill Spider-Man. You never asked me to rescue him.”

“No, I didn’t ask,” May agreed, mouth curling in contempt. “And I’m not fucking asking now. Don’t try to tell me you can save Peter Parker, Olivia. You had your chance to do that, and you stayed damn well clear.” 

Liv had more to say to that, more angles to try, but May was done talking. Was _out-of-the-room_ done talking, had both coffee cups in her hand and the armchair pushed back and was stalking in a huff through the door to the kitchen. The door swung shut behind her, and Liv couldn’t follow. When she tried to use her arms to push herself off the couch, she let out a small hiss of pain and sank quickly back into the cushions.

This was going to be a complicated week. 

**Author's Note:**

> I welcome feedback/predictions/reactions of all kinds. This is my first shot at AO3 and I'm still feeling out the story conventions.


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